1. Technical Field
The invention disclosed is broadly related to data processing systems and methods and is more particularly related to the creation, display and editing of complex, multimedia documents forms.
2. Background Art
The data processing industry has advanced to the point of making use of scanned images of document forms as an efficient means for storing, displaying and manipulating documents. A number of patents have described the general operational principles of document image architectures.
For example a system for storing and manipulating digitized images is provided in U.S. Pat. No. 5,153,936 entitled "Dual Density Digital Image System," by H. M. Morris, et al., issued Oct. 6, 1992, assigned to the IBM Corporation and incorporated herein by reference.
A patent which illustrates document image architectures is U.S. Pat. No. 5,058,185 by C. A. Parks, et al. entitled "Object Management and Delivery System Having Multiple Object-Resolution Capability," issued Oct. 15, 1991, and assigned to the IBM Corporation and incorporated herein by reference.
The above mentioned patent application and issued patent described an example digital image archiving system within which the invention herein may be applied. The data processing technique of archiving images of documents also has applied this technology to the creation and storage of blank forms of documents to be filled out later by an operator. One technique to perform text overlay onto the image of a document form is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,025,396 by Parks, et al. entitled "Method and Apparatus for Merging a Digitized Image With an Alphanumeric Character String," assigned to the IBM Corporation and incorporated herein by reference.
An area which has not been adequately solved in the data processing industry is storage manipulation and editing of multimedia documents. Still more so, multimedia document forms have not been adequately treated in the data processing industry.